Search Optimization School

Keyword density and SEO go hand in hand. The search crawler has so many things to figure out when visiting your page and relevancy. The Google algorithm wants to know that you’re not a spammer, or trying to manipulate the rankings in any way. Sometimes they’re really good at this, other times – not so good. Every time they do any update to keep people from gaming the rankings, people find new loopholes and ways to game the engine.

Learning SEO is something that you learn in chunks, and I firmly believe that the more “bullets” you have in your arsenal – the more successful you’ll be overall. It’s important that you have the right keywords in the right places, but it’s also important that you don’t “overuse” them. That’s where keyword density and SEO come into play.

How keyword density and SEO works

Keyword density is a percentage of the total words you use in a post. Let’s say you had a short post of only 180 words, and had used a two word phrase 5 times in the textual content. Your “keyword density” could be 5.37%. Remove the “stop words” (common words like the, and, or – etc) and it might double to 10% or more.

If you’re writing articles to seed the search engines with original content, not learning about keyword density is like throwing away opportunities. Also, if you think you’re going to dominate search with 100 word posts that use your target keywords 5 times, that’s not going to work either.

Keyword Density and SEO Rules of Thumb

Here are some great rules of thumb to use when writing posts and pages for your web site.

• Write effective SEO titles (see yesterdays post)
• Write great original content with 400-800+ words per page
• Use images optimized with your keywords on each page (see post from 2 days ago)
• Keep the density for your target keyword phrase to 3-5% per page
• It’s best not to target more than one main keyword phrase per page, but if you must, try and keep it down to 2-3 phrases

There are online tools that you can use to generate keyword density percentages after your pages are published. Personally, I haven’t found these to be so reliable – but they are free.

You could also try the free wordpress plugin keyword statistics. You can set it up to use stop words (or not), and it will give you a pretty good picture of what your score is. I don’t like the fact that it only shows you keyword density and a percentage. It won’t tell you anything about headings or images at all.

The most professional keyword density tool I’ve seen to date is SEOPressor – which is a premium (but VERY affordable) plugin for WordPress. It gives you a keyword density score, and keeps track of all the areas that you’ve used your target keyword (headings, images, meta, etc.). If you’re serious about your rankings, that’s what I would use. I’ve been using it on all of my sites with good results for the last few months.

You could spend hundres of hours learning SEO, but learning “How to Write an SEO Title” for your pages is probably the most important thing that you could do. As I mentioned in the last post, google uses over 200 rankings signals to determine your fate in the results pages, but the one that is probably the heaviest weight of all is the title of your page. The “HTML title”.

This post contains information that you can use to SEO your title for any kind of web site, static HTML pages, WordPress, Joomla, Drupal – whatever you’ve got. I’m going to assume that whatever you have named the page in your web site software will become the HTML title. The HTML title is the tag in the head portion, it’s the text between the beginning and ending tags that say <title> and <title/>.

*Please note*: it DOES help if the URL of the page, the page heading AND the HTML title uses the same SEO keywords.

How the SEO title works

An HTML title should be 75 characters or less, because search crawlers generally won’t index more than that. Use the keywords that you think people will actually use in a Google search.

I’m naming this page “How to Write an SEO Title”, because that’s what I think people will search for to find this content. It could also be “Writing Effective SEO Titles”, “How the HTML title tag and SEO work”, etc. The important thing is that I have the keywords “SEO Title” in there with some natural language that’s relevant.

Why People Click Titles

The tricky thing is (that I hadn’t mentioned yet), you want your title to be SEO friendly and good for search engines, but you also want your title to be what they call “link bait”. In other words, use SEO words, but make the title something that people will actually want to click on. Entice them – make them think that if they don’t click they will be missing out. Don’t be spammy – but use a little marketing sense and optimize that title for both people and search engines

Original Content

I have 15 years experience working online, and in my experience Google is pretty good at figuring out you’re trying to get a good ranking. It knows the difference between making your title “SEO Title” and “My SEO Titles get 100X more clicks”. When your title contains more than just the keyword phrase alone with a little natural language, as long as your page content has strong original content – you stand a chance at getting a better ranking overall. When Google thinks that you’re writing good original content that people will want to read – you will be more successful every time!

Do you take advantage of image SEO? I mean, are images part of your SEO plan to get additional traffic for your web site? Do you use them to your advantage? When used properly, images can be a great SEO friendly tool.

Image SEO

Let’s say you have an article you’re posting, and you’ve optimized the title and the content for SEO. You’ve chosen some great keywords, used the appropriate categories and tags, and now you’re ready to publish it. Does the article contain an image? Did you use that image to your SEO advantage?

Google uses more than 200 ranking signals when indexing content, and the more signals you can influence with items in your article – the better.

There are 2 things you should know:

1. Images can help determine relevance
2. Images can be their own source of traffic

First of all, find or create an image (respecting copyrights of course) to use with your post. Save it to your desktop and change the file name to that of your target keywords. If your post is about “image seo” then the file name should be something like “image-seo.jpg”.

Insert that image in your post somewhere near the top of the page, I usually do it after the first few sentences or the first paragraph. When you insert the image give it both an alt and title tag “image seo”. Now you have the trifecta, the file name, and alt and title tag are the same as your target keyword phrase for the article. You’ve used the image to boost the relevance of your page in search engine results pages (SERPs).

However, one thing that you may not have known is, you’ve setup the image with it’s own filename based SEO keywords, and now the google image search crawler is going to pick that up and index it for google image search. You would be surprised how much traffic this can bring. I’ve had pages that ranked #1 in google image search for the picture, that brought visitors to the site that way – and I made all my money from monetization that way, rather than traditional search.

Case and point, I have an image indexed for furniture on another site, and for some reason people were searching for an image of what they wanted so they could see it and try to figure out what they wanted. Then they would click through, read the full post – and buy. This won’t work for all sites, but it sure will for many!

Using images to boost SEO is a solid practice, and something you should be using at all times in your site. If not, you’re just throwing some opportunities away!

SEODigger.com is an SEO tool that helps you find out what keywords a domain ranks for in google top 20 listings. I ran my URL and came up for keyword phrases I didn’t even know I ranked for. They have both a premium and free services available once you signup for an account – but I’m just using the free service for now. Check it out! You can get a quick and dirty look at where your blog stands in SERP’s, and maybe find out some new keyword phrases to key in on for monetization!

The ABC of SEO: Search Engine Optimization Strategies
Price: $19.90

SEO – Search Engine Optimization Bible
Price: $39.99

Thanks to Smashing Magazine, today I learned of the WordPress or WP SEO plugin that can and will replace just about every other SEO plugin you may already have installed. I can tell you, since I installed it – I have deleted both “Optimal Title” and “HEAD Meta Description” wordpress plugins, as well as ““. As mentioned in the Smashing Magazine post – I think that this plugin is still relatively unknown to most people, I first heard about it today. Let me point out the reasons that this WP SEO plugin is so valuable:

Not only does this plugin give the most fine grained SEO control for WordPress I’ve ever seen – but it had one feature that I didn’t even know existed. There is one option to “Add meta name=’robots’ content=’noodp’ to sourcecode”. I had never seen this robots “noodp” tag before, so I googled it and came up with this page on How do I change my site’s title and description. Basically in a nutshell, the googlebot (when it indexes your pages) uses an automated algorithm to create the title and descriptions that will be seen by web surfers doing searches and getting the search engine result pages (SERP’s). The googlebot takes into account the content of a page and references to it on the web. To prevent search engines from automatically doing this – and force them to use your html title and description tags, you need to use the robots noodp tag in your pages (which this WP plugin will automatically do).

Now that I’ve enabled this plugin and setup the options I wanted, the next time the googlebot comes around to this site – it should dramatically change the way Search Optimization School web pages are indexed, and hopefully we get some much better rankings for quite a few. If you have comments about this plugin, or ways that you’ve dramatically enhanced your SEO in WordPress – leave them now below!

Wow, I’m reading over at the Dfinitive Blog how google has removed the supplemental index tag, and that’s just amazing to me! The Google Webmaster Blog talks about it in the post “Supplemental Goes Mainstream. On the one hand you might think ‘wow this is good’. But as Dfinitive points out – this is really bad. Think about it. When you found your results in the Supplemental Index in Google -you KNEW something was wrong with those pages (duplicate content, too many links, bad links, spam). As a results – most of us (that didn’t want to seem them there) strived to FIX them and get them back in the regular index.

Matt Cutts said:

“I believe it’s good to remove this query because I don’t want people to get fixated on Supplemental Results and focus on them to the exclusion of other aspects of SEO….”

While a really worthy statement – it is very telling, isn’t it? It’s almost a slap in the face in a way – like saying ‘hey, those pages were put there because they deserved to be…and we’re not going to point them out anymore. You should know better and do good seo anway…’. So what does this mean? Now, everything is in the main index and if you have bad pages they’ll just go to the ass end? Or, will the ‘supplemental index’ still exist – but just not be publicly identified? As with most google changes, we’ll have to do some investigation and reading to figure the impact of this one…

Your thoughts? Comment now below!

You know, I planned on writing a lot of articles for this site to help webmasters get better and higher web page rankings in the search engines. However, the whole reason a webmaster wants better rankings is to get more traffic. And 98% of web site owners want to monetize that traffic and turn it into money. One of the most common ways to turn that traffic into money is by using google adsense. Back in the early days of the web, putting ads on your site – like banner ads or popups, was seen as “selling out”. Nowadays – everybody wants to sell out, and find and exploit the easiest ways to make money online. Unfortunately this has led to many web sites being setup with mostly ads and little content. These are MFA or “Made for Adsense” sites, or a web site with little or no other purpose than to make money from adsense. Sometimes you will see what I call DCA sites, or “Daisy Chain Adsense” sites. This is where you search for something in google, and click on a result and go to an MFA site with mostly ads. Clicking on one of those ads leads you to another MFA, and another, and another, etc. The site owner loves this because you have click on multiple ads multiple times paying him each time through adsense revenue. The user hates this, because it’s just more and more wasted time online trying to find what you’re looking for.

Web site owners have complained for a very long time that google has done nothing about this, and in fact encouraged by allowing it to occur. Many have speculated that google doesn’t mind since every click (of an adsense ad) just makes them more money – so they turn a blind eye. Well, no more – because google has finally decided to put an end to shady web site owners profiting off of their back. In the last few weeks hundreds, if not thousands, of “low value content” web sites have had their accounts cancelled because “they were not a good fit for the adsense program”. This is great news for search engine users, google is actually trying to improve it’s results.

Google has also cancelled many adsense (and adwords) accounts for using “arbitrage” for profit. Arbitrage is the practice of buying keywords through a google adwords account to target and send traffic to your web site, and then having adsense ads on your web pages for people to click on once they get there. Basically, these site owners are betting that by doing a little research – they can buy really cheap keywords through adwords, and then make more money (than they spent) by users clicking on adsense ads once they get there. Essentially “arbitrage” or “buying your own traffic” just seems ethically wrong, and google must think so as well since they’ve been actively shutting down both adsense and adwords accounts of people suspected of doing this.

It’s good that google is valuing quality search results over profit, and this would go hand in hand with their “don’t be evil” policy. Even though google is the dominant search engine, with as much of a stranglehold on search as Microsoft has on the desktop, I think they are looking ahead to the future. They want to retain that position, and they know that keeping the search results as pure as possible keeps them competitive.

Google has also been cracking down on other web sites lately that are in violation with their TOS (Terms of Service). I was personally caught up in this myself, as one of my sites received a warning email from google stating that I violated the adsense TOS because my website contained “adult or mature” content. At first I was pretty pissed of – because this site as in excess of 30,000 pages. And a lot of the content is derived from current headlines and popular news stories. I have a block in one of the margins on this site that lists the top 20 (accessed) stories for that day. I forget sometimes the real nature of people. Take a look sometimes at the top searched keywords for different search engines. Inevitably, the top 20 always have something to do with sex or adult themes. Time after time, these are the most popular things that people search for. Out of the 30,000 pages my web site has less than 300 with stories about or related to sex and adult themes. That’s about 1% of my content. However, out of the “top 20 accessed” block on my site – probably 15 are adult themed or sex related. By sheer human nature, they just always seem to end up the most popular. Google has determined that because of this that they don’t want (adsense) to be associated with this web site.

Ironically, many of the ads that appeared through adsense were adult related – from people buying adult keywords through google adwords. So one argument is that they should control the purchase of certain keywords in adwords in addition to closing adsense accounts on adult related sites. Also – google has begun attacking “duplicate content”. Duplicate content is just what you think it is – the same content on 2 different web sites, or 2 different pages on the same web site. With so many blogs and aggregators, news headlines sites, etc., it is very important that the originator of a story get much higher preference in search results vs. the “duplicate content” sites.

Google isn’t killing the adsense accounts for sites with duplicate content – but they are giving preference to the originating sites, and sending the duplicate content URL’s to a “supplemental index”. So, it’s more important now than ever write original content in your web sites. Google has recently applied for 2 patents that accomplish this. The first is for LSI or “Latent Semantic Indexing”. The second is for “Phrase Matching”. These patents, along with a 600,000 keyword index will drastically change which web site pages are indexed and where they come up in the search results. You can tell that in may ways, this goes hand in hand with google’s removing of “low value content” web sites. Sites with “duplicate content” are pretty much low value too aren’t they? And by removing all but the original to a “supplemental index”, aren’t you making your search results even more pure?

So be aware of these new google rules, and how they might affect both your web site, and your adsense and adwords accounts. Content is king!? You can read about google’s new actions in many webmaster forums, like these postings over at Webmaster World.